Developer Diaries

The Golden Compass Composer Diary

We hear the beat from videogame composer Jaimie Christopherson with exclusive music from the game!

In this standalone developer diary, GameSpy hears from videogame composer Jaimie Christopherson to find out exactly what it takes to create a full-length score for a videogame based on a rich license; in this case, The Golden Compass. There are two exclusive MP3s included so you can hear a bit of what he came up with. Keep looking back here for GameSpy's ongoing coverage of The Golden Compass.

Writing the music for The Golden Compass was one of the most rewarding, exhilarating and intense composing experiences that I've had to date. I was just coming off a long string of pretty big projects, including games such as Stranglehold (Midway), Surf's Up (Ubisoft), Bladestorm (KOEI), Bionic Commando (Capcom) and an independent film titled "Ghost Image." With my wife and I expecting our first baby girl in about a month, I was looking forward to taking it a little easy and helping her to prepare for the big day. Of course, the universe had an entirely different plan for me, as I was about to embark on an incredible music journey before welcoming our daughter into this world!

I first got involved with the project when Levon Schwartz, head of audio at Shiny Entertainment (now a member off The Collective and Foundation 9), was introduced to me through Michael Kimball here at Soundelux Design Music Group (where my studio currently resides). We instantly hit it off. After he heard the tailored demo that I put together for the game, he asked me if I could write an insane number of minutes of music in a very short amount of time. Naturally, I said yes! We needed to come up with about 80 minutes of score (excluding the multiple stems) for The Golden Compass game in about one month, with nearly half of the music requiring a full, live orchestra and the rest of the music requiring live musicians on every cue. Needless to say, it was about to get pretty intense.

Thankfully, being able to work with Levon was really a dream come true for a composer. His direction allowed me to take some creative freedoms that I haven't been able to do many times in the past on games. He trusted my instincts. We were on the same page from the very start with the style of music that had to be written for the game, and when he did have suggestions for changes on certain cues, he liked to talk in descriptive non-musical terms that really helped me to find the emotions he was after. Levon was also in charge of playing my music for the team at Shiny, the executives at Sega, and ultimately for the film producers and executives at New Line Cinema. Fortunately, we got approvals on all cues just before the big orchestra session. Without someone like Levon on my side throughout the project, we wouldn't have been able to pull off such an amazing feat, considering all of the politics involved.

Just a week before signing on to do the music for the game, I came across the trailer for The Golden Compass film. When I saw that trailer, I was thinking to myself the movie looked so cool that I wished I could do a score for a fantasy adventure project like that. I guess the universe listened, and I was instantly thrown into that world.

After doing a bit of research online I discovered that the film and game were based on a book series titled "His Dark Materials" that has quickly gained a pretty big fan base all over the world. I went out and bought the book right away, as usually I like to do as much research about a project as possible before writing one note. However, the schedule was so tight that I never got around to reading it before diving into the score. As a matter of fact, I still haven't read the original novel yet!

Thankfully, I had other material to study before writing began. Since I was brought onto the project at a very late date, all of the major animation was already completed. I was fortunate on this game to get video capture for every element of the game, which allowed me to really dive deeply into the characters and setting. The artwork and video footage that I had to work with were pretty polished, so it was easy to get inspiration from those. Often I am only given a few early screenshots and descriptions of the characters and levels, which is great, but kind of like writing music for a film that hasn't been shot yet.